Abstraction-Création

Abstraction-Création. An association of abstract painters and sculptors formed in Paris in February 1931 in succession to the short-lived Cercle et Carré group, whose mailing list the new association took over. The prime movers behind Abstraction-Création were Jean Hélion, Auguste Herbin, and Georges Vantongerloo, who all practised the type of abstract art in which works are constructed from completely non-representational, usually geometrical, elements, rather than derived from natural appearances. Although geometrical abstraction was especially well represented in the association, it was open to abstract artists of all persuasions and the membership at one time rose to as many as 400. Artists of numerous nationalities joined, among them Arp, Gabo, Kandinsky, Lissitzky, Mondrian, and Pevsner. Many members had left the totalitarian regimes in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, where avant-garde art was outlawed, and their presence in Paris helped to make it the most important centre for abstract art in the 1930s. Also included in the membership were artists who were never permanently resident in Paris, such as Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson. The association operated by arranging group exhibitions and by publishing an illustrated annual entitled Abstraction-Création: Art non-figuratif, which appeared from 1932 to 1936 with different editors for each issue. The first issue explained the choice of name of the association and the annual: ‘abstraction, because certain artists have come to the concept of non-figuration by the progressive abstraction of forms from nature’; ‘creation, because other artists have attained non-figuration direct, purely via geometry, or by the exclusive use of elements commonly called abstract, such as circles, planes, bars, lines, etc.’; and ‘non-figuration, that is to say a purely plastic culture which excludes every element of explication, anecdote, literature, naturalism, etc.’ In the later 1930s the association dwindled, but after the Second World War its ideals were carried on by the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles.